New Offers for Visual Studio 2010

Last October, we announced a new packaging lineup and licensing options for Visual Studio 2010 to provide customers with simplified ways to purchase and license Visual Studio.The new lineup includes three main versions of Visual Studio with appropriate MSDN subscriptions to go with Ultimate, Premium and Professional.

Many of you have asked what this meant for Standard Edition customers looking to upgrade.

Visual Studio 2010 provides significant new benefits, such as the ability to optimize your development environment with multi-monitor support, and the ability to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework with one tool. For Standard customers this functionality represents a substantial step up in tooling.

Today, we’re also unveiling an offer for customers who purchase Visual Studio Professional at retail. To help these developers fully realize the power and benefits of a MSDN subscription, I am announcing MSDN Essentials, a one-year trial MSDN subscription that will be included with every retail copy of Visual Studio Professional sold.

MSDN Essentials subscribers will have access to three of the latest Microsoft platforms: Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, and SQL Server 2008 Datacenter R2 for development and test use, as well as 20 hours of Windows Azure. Subscribers will also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, Priority Support in MSDN Forums, and will be included in special offers from partners.

For the first time ever, we are giving developers the opportunity to pre-order Visual Studio 2010. The Microsoft Store and select online resellers will pre-sell Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN Essentials from March 9th until the product launch.